Clear Light of Day

by Penelope Wilcock

  Esme could never analyze, though on occasion she had given it a lot of thought, how Jabez could both create an aura of stillness even when he was working, or walking down the street, and equally impart a sense of movement when, as now, he sat entirely still yet in some way she could not define, seemed to be vanishing, withdrawing into himself, before her eyes.

  “Stationing normally takes about eighteen months,” she said. “But because of the particular situation both here and in Surrey, they’re going to curtail my appointment here. It might be as early as this autumn. More likely in the beginning of the winter. We just want to give ourselves time to do everything properly.” She waited for him to speak again, eventually saying into the silence, “Aren’t you pleased for me?”

  He took a drink of his tea.

  “I shall miss you,” he said finally. “If it’s what you want, of course, I’m pleased for you.” He glanced up at her, squinting into the sunlight. “I’m sorry, I’m not meaning to be a wet blanket. I can’t quite imagine life without you now.”

  Esme smiled. “You can always come and visit me at the parsonage in Surrey! It’s huge. You could stay overnight.”

  Jabez stubbed his cigarette out thoughtfully on the stone flags of the yard. “Can I?” he said. “Thank you.”

  He picked up his mug, drank most of the tea, and tossed the dregs down the nearby drain. “Better get on,” he remarked. “Well done, Esme; that’s great news.”

  Esme watched him work until she finished her cup of tea. Deflated by the flatness and anticlimax of his reaction, she decided against trying to show him the letter. He was evidently determined not to discuss it. It was hard to think of anyone who would be pleased to read it among her church members either. So after a little while of further desultory conversation, she took the letter home and telephoned her mother, who was comfortingly congratulatory.

  As she sat down at her desk with a cup of coffee that afternoon, and switched on her computer to draft her order of service for Sunday in time for the organist phoning through for the hymns, Esme felt exulted in her success. I’ve made it! she said to herself. Then, as she waited for the computer to be ready, unexpectedly her mood changed to reveal an inexplicable underlying weariness, as though the whole Surrey thing amounted to no more than a balloon brought home by a child from a party. She had a sudden sense of her professional life as a flimsy house built to impress; instead of a solid foundation, an empty reservoir of loneliness.

  Don’t be silly, you’re just tired, she told herself firmly. She turned from the thought, reminding herself that staying was no longer an option, and she opened a new file and set up the page as she wanted it.

  In the yard of his cottage at Wiles Green, carefully, meticulously, Jabez completed the servicing of the lawnmower. He loaded it in the back of his truck, returned it to Marcus’s garage, and received his payment politely. He wanted to ask Marcus how much he knew about Esme’s move but thought better of it in case she preferred anything kept private.

  Through the afternoon he occupied himself, working doggedly, systematically, sorting and tidying things in his workshop, listing spare parts to be ordered. He took some old oil to be recycled and called for some bread at the bakers on the way home. His face was still and remote as he worked, like reflections on dark water. In some locked recess of his being, he felt the terrifying music of grief begin again, and he held his being as still as he could to quiet its broken, discordant cacophony. His hands shook. He had been this way before. He felt it approaching.

  Ember, coming through to feed the hens toward evening, found him standing in the middle of the living room, his face in his hands, the convulsing muscles of his belly bending him almost double, his silver waterfall of hair shaking with the storm of sobbing that racked his body, the muffled groan of his voice in despair, “Oh, Jesus; oh, Jesus.”

  Ember went swiftly to him, and with firm hands guided him to the battered old sofa, sat him down, and seated herself beside him, very close, one hand on his back and one on his knee, feeling his body hard and tense with his anguish.

  “What?” she asked him. “Who has done this to you?”

  Long ago, Jabez, having wondered if when a heart breaks it snaps like a dry twig or more raggedly like a green branch, or rends reluctantly like the tearing of strong linen, discovered that in fact the human heart never breaks at all. Its tragedy is that it belongs to our flesh, and however lacerated and swollen and bruised, it goes on loving, it cannot let go, being offered neither the respite nor the welcome end of breaking.

  “She’s leaving me. Oh, it’s so painful! So painful! So painful! She’s going.” He sobbed out the words incoherently. “Oh, God, it just hurts so much, so much, so much!”

  He collapsed into a paroxysm of weeping, and Ember waited, quite still, while the tempest shook and racked and wrenched the frame of him.

  Eventually the choking sobs that tore him abated, until he sat trembling, his breath shuddering and catching, his hands covering his face.

  Then Ember lifted the corner of her apron and, removing his hands one after the other from his face, wiped away the tears without speaking. He did not look at her, but shook his head, hopelessly, deep tremors of grief running through his whole body.

  “Oh dear,” he said at last. “Oh, dear, dear me; what am I going to do? Whatever am I going to do? Oh, dear …” In utter misery he wrung his hands together, and then his face twisted as he collapsed again into helpless weeping.

  “I can’t!” he cried out through the tears. “I can’t go through it again! I can’t lose her! Oh, God, help me. Oh, God, what can I do?”

  Ember held him, rocked him gently, talked soothing nonsense to him, stroked his hands. She sat by him until, empty and wrecked, he was still. Then, “Lie down, Jabez,” she said, “while I make up the fire.”

  She put a cushion to pillow his head and made him lie down on the couch, stood in pity watching his body involuntarily contracting into a tight ball as the torture of grief started again, and his features distorted once more into a mask of agony. He turned his face away into the privacy of the cushion.

  Ember frowned, in a small, densely concentrated space of thought. Then her habitual expression of clarity and determination returned. She left him, went to her room, and pulled the blanket from her bed, brought it downstairs and tucked it around him. She knelt at the hearth to light the fire, then got to her feet and stood by the sofa again to look at him, curled up in desolation, his eyes open but gazing without hope at nothing. Ember bent and stroked the silver hair, tenderly molding her hand to the contours of his head and neck.

  “You just rest now, my lamb,” she said. “Get you some sleep. It’ll be all right. You’ll not lose her. ’Tis entirely of God that lies between you and she. ’Tis not a passing fancy, ’tis eternal. Take comfort now and rest. It will be well, Jabez, I promise you.”

  She regarded him a moment longer, then treading quietly she left the room, found her coat and scarf, fed the hens and locked them in against the visits of the fox, shut up the garden shed and the workshop, fetched her hat and stick, and set off to walk to Southarbour.

  It had turned midnight when Esme, finishing off the updating of her pastoral lists on her computer, was startled by a determined knocking at her door. She switched on the porch light and drew back the bolt.

  “Good gracious, Ember, whatever is it?” she asked, astonished as she opened the door and beheld the small and furious bundle of rage wrapped in winter woollies on her doorstep. “Come in!”

  “Thank you, I will,” snapped Ember, continuing as she stepped into the hall. “What do they teach you in these Christian chapels? Anything? Nothing? Have you no shame? Have you no pity? Have you no wisdom? No understanding? No insight? Do they not teach you that love brings responsibility?”

  She stood, bristling, glaring at Esme, her obsidian eyes bright with anger.

&n
bsp; Esme experienced the familiar quailing in her abdomen, the urge to run, lie, get help. She wondered if there was any place in the world safe from old ladies.

  “What are you talking about, Ember?” she asked when the gunfire of questions had stopped. “Come into the kitchen. Let me make you some coffee. How did you get here? It’s awfully late. Come on.”

  She let Ember follow her into the kitchen, filled the electric kettle, and switched it on to boil.

  “I walked.”

  Esme turned and looked at her in amazement. “Walked? Why, Ember, you’re eighty-six! It’s seven miles to Wiles Green from here! It must have taken you forever!”

  Esme often felt that Ember’s eyes might almost as well have had sound effects. Just now they looked as though they should be spitting and crackling like faulty electricals.

  “Yes,” said Ember, as Esme set a mug of coffee down in front of her. “But it’ll be a lot quicker getting back, because you’ll be taking me in that car of yours when you come over to sort out the mess you’ve made of Jabez.”

  Esme looked completely taken aback. “Jabez? I have?” She stared at Ember, and then, slowly, comprehension dawned on her face. “Because of the appointment in Surrey?” she asked, horrified.

  “Surrey? Where’s that? What’s the place like? Is it far away?”

  Sitting down opposite Ember at the table, Esme told her about the appointment, the opportunity, the letter. She explained all that it meant, able somehow to put into words to Ember what Jabez would never understand—the desire to make something of herself, to do well, to get past the humiliation of other people’s pity.

  “I hadn’t really thought through what it might mean to Jabez,” she confessed. “I honestly don’t know where things are going with him and me. I feel as though I’ve known him forever, although it hasn’t really been very long, and I can see he loves me dearly, but—well—he’s not a very demonstrative man, is he? In any case, just suppose Jabez and I were together—and that still is presuming something beyond where we seem to be right now—could he not come with me? There must be bicycles and lawnmowers to fix in Surrey, mustn’t there? Women move to go with their men. These days the men are learning to move with the women.”

  Ember considered this, frowning ferociously at the table.

  “I believe,” she said then, thoughtfully, “in the freedom of living beings. Not only human beings, mind you, but all beings. I believe we should live in ways that respect the freedom of all beings. And protect it from those that have no such respect. Protection brings limiting of course. Locking things in at night from the fox, maybe. It’s a complicated thing. Be that as it may, among human beings, I believe in the freedom of women as well as the freedom of men. I was married but a year or two, and I never missed him when he was gone. I didn’t want a man cluttering up my life. Mistaking me for his mother and clamoring for the needs of his belly and his bed. Confounded nuisances are men. Meeting Jabez Ferrall was quite a surprise to me. He don’t flirt with anyone, he can think, he lives by his principles, he expects to do his own cooking, and he don’t expect either of us to clean his house—had I a-been twenty years younger he might have caused me to revise my habits of mind. I’m not sending you to sleep with my chuntering on, am I?”

  Esme smiled at her. “Go on.”

  “So I believe in your freedom, Esme. I can see you’re an ambitious woman. You have an urge to get on in life. But I think I see also in the woman you are, something that understands simplicity; how precious it is—how you have to work for it and struggle for it and defend it in this day and age. And then again, you’re a spiritual woman; so am I. And if you’ll forgive the tedious hearken-to-me of an old woman to a young one, I believe I got to remind you that simplicity is the gateway to spiritual living. You can’t have one without the other. That’s why you love Jabez—because love him you do, my dear; and I think you’d find yourself in a pretty pickle lost in the barren desert of all they streets and cars without Jabez Ferrall’s bicycle shed for a refuge. You was hungry enough in your soul when you first found him. Am I not right?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Esme sighed. She stirred. “I suppose so.”

  “You got to see, there’s something you are overlooking in Jabez. He won’t transplant. You might as well try to put a sixty-eight-year-old tree in a clay pot, take it with you to this Surrey, stick it in the flower bed, and hope it’ll be all right. Jabez is not just passing through Wiles Green. He was born there. His parents were born there. It’s his home. His father was born in the bedroom where Jabez sleeps of a night. Jabez brought his bride to bed in that cottage, and she bore his children there, three of them—two of them grown and gone into the world, and his baby girl buried under the apple tree in his orchard there. He nursed his wife in that cottage when she was sick and ’twas from there that they carried out her body. You might as well take a fancy to tag the moon along with you on the end of a string as try to uproot Jabez from his cottage. The kind of men you mean that move about the world, and the professional women who keep them moving—some of them are sophisticated, some of them are unhappy, some of them are like air plants that thrive on any rock where they perch. But they’ve forgotten, the whole modern world has forgotten, the meaning of home. And maybe your Jesus was much to blame. Itchy feet, that man. What can you expect, born in a stable, dropped like a bit of baggage at the journey’s end. Hardly knew where he belonged, I should think.”

  “Well, not in this world, anyway,” said Esme. “But, thank you, Ember. If I’m honest I hadn’t liked to look at it too closely, really. I can’t see that I’ve got many options. I have tried to talk to Jabez about the new job, but he just blanks me out.”

  She cupped her hands around the warm mug of coffee, gazing thoughtfully into space. “You’re right. I do love him. We must surely be able to sort something out.”

  “Then it may be all down to you, my dear. I told you before, Jabez needs a bit of a shove sometimes. Doesn’t like to push himself forward or intrude where he’s not wanted.”

  “Not that kind of man,” said Esme, with a smile, downing the rest of her coffee. “Now, what about tonight? Are you staying here? Am I taking you home?”

  “Taking me home,” replied Ember firmly. “He’s not fit to be left alone at present. Almost made hisself sick sobbing this night.”

  “What?” Esme stared at Ember in horror. “For goodness sake! Okay, let’s go. I’m ready, I’ll just get my coat.”

  Ember looked at her speculatively.

  “What?” Esme asked her.

  “I’ll just use your lavatory if I may,” Ember said, coyly. It rang a little odd, but it passed Esme by—“Oh, I’m sorry, I should have asked you before,” she said. “There’s one downstairs and one upstairs.”

  “Upstairs, please,” Ember replied decidedly and headed purposefully for the stairs.

  While Ember was in the bathroom, Esme went back into her study to tidy away confidential files and shut down her computer. Then she went out to put her bike away in the garage, returned to lock the back door, and find her car keys, after which Ember appeared on the stairs, clutching her coat about her, ready for the outdoors.

  “’Tis cold tonight,” she remarked conversationally. “I hope the blossom don’t get frosted.”

  Esme felt concerned about Jabez, but she enjoyed the drive to Wiles Green, the stars shining down from a clear sky until she lost sight of them as the road dipped down between the trees and hedges, and the moonlight flicked barred on her car through the branches overhead. There coming up from the ditch her headlights picked out a fox sliding silently into the undergrowth, and alongside the field gate the striped face of a badger watching them go by.

  When they reached Wiles Green and turned off the road, Ember suggested they park the car in the lane—there might be too little space to turn around in the yard with the way Jabez had left the truck parked
, not expecting Esme to come tonight, she explained—and reassured Esme they would be in nobody’s way. This seemed sensible enough, so they left the car in the lane and walked together along the path around to the kitchen door.

  “Freezing in here, stove’s out,” muttered Ember as she stepped into the house. “I left him in the living room,” she added.

  Esme looked toward the door that led into the house. No lights had been turned on, but in the living room maybe there was a glow of firelight she could see. With a sudden feeling of apprehension, guilty at the unhappiness she had caused, she went hesitantly through from the kitchen into the room beyond.

  Bright moonlight shone into the room and found the silver lights of his hair. He was sitting with Ember’s blanket pulled around his shoulders, gazing at the glowing remains of the fire, very still. Even in the kindness of shadow and firelight, his face looked haggard and lost and old.

  “Jabez?”

  He looked up in amazement. “Esme!” He stared at her. “What time is it?” he asked, bewildered.

  “Nearly two o’clock, I think. Ember came to find me. She said you were really upset.”

  He moved his hand in a vague gesture of deprecation. “I’m all right. What do you mean she came to find you? Walked, you mean?”

  Esme nodded. “Yes. It’s taken her hours. Jabez, can I put the lamp on? I can hardly see you.”

  “Of course,” he said. As she turned back to him from the light switch, he was blinking from the comparative brightness, and then as he adjusted to it, she looked at him more closely, his eyes baggy and bloodshot, his face ravaged from weeping.

  “Jabez, you look exhausted! You look absolutely done in. Oh, I’m so sorry about what I said; I didn’t mean to hurt you so. It’ll be all right, we can work something out.”